Bloodlines

62

F OR A WHILE, I THOUGHT THAT GIVING ETHAN A CHANCE WAS GOING TO cause a bigger fight between Lydia and me than the one we had over him before. Somewhere along the line we both saw that, pulled back a bit, and she (a little gleefully, I thought) told me she thought it would be a good thing if I took him under my wing. “He’s all yours,” she said.

Not exactly what I had in mind, but I couldn’t really back down.

Mark Baker, who was too tied up with writing stories about current criminal activities to be very active in the historical ones, told me that he wouldn’t mind working with Ethan if I didn’t want to be his scoutmaster.

“If it doesn’t work out,” I said, “you’re my backup.”

“He’s not going to be your problem,” Mark said. “Hailey is going to pitch a fit.”

He was right. When I told Hailey that we were going to share our research with him, she told me I was crazy, that he was using me, and went on and on about it. “Ethan is going to be working with us,” I said, interrupting her. “If you don’t want to work with him, you can find something else to do.”

She stood up. She didn’t quite go so far as moving to the door, but I wouldn’t have laid money on her staying. The success of the interview with Helen had produced a foreseeable side effect-Hailey, not exactly humble to begin with, now thought fairly highly of herself. I found myself half-wishing she’d walk away.

“Why should I be forced to put up with him?” she asked.

“You’ve never needed a second chance, I suppose? Or maybe you’re looking for an excuse to go home earlier in the day.”

She sat down, but said, “I love what we’re doing, but-I don’t trust Ethan!”

“I can’t make you trust him. Not going to try. But if you want to keep working on stories with me, you’re going to work on stories with Ethan.”

He met us late that afternoon in a conference room just off the morgue. I learned that he had kept up with our stories about the old cases of 1958 and 1978, which had been running in the Express as a series in the weeks before Max’s DNA test results were known. Hailey recapped what we had been looking into now-stories about the business connections between the Ducanes, the Linworths, and the Yeagers, as well as whatever personal backgrounds we could come up with.

“We think the Linworths and Ducanes screwed Mitch Yeager out of some money while he was under arrest in 1936,” Hailey said. “His bail was set high, and he needed cash. He needed money to pay his attorneys, too.”

“Wasn’t his family wealthy?” Ethan asked.

“His family had been involved in rum-running,” I said, “but Prohibition had recently ended, so bootlegging wasn’t profitable.”

“Barrett Ducane offered to help Yeager raise cash by buying some of his assets, assets that were worth much more than Ducane paid for them,” Hailey said. “Linworth bought a few things as well, and those deals were in his favor, but not as lopsided as Ducane’s. Ducane and Linworth both knew that money was going to be made from the coming war in Europe and elsewhere-so they chose companies that could be easily retooled to make aircraft parts and munitions and things like that.”

“What did you find out today?” I asked Ethan.

“It’s probably not worth anything,” he said.

Hailey smirked.

He took a deep breath and explained to her why he had been researching Eden Supply. “It was owned by Granville Enterprises. Granville owned a lot of smaller, agriculturally related companies. Granville was a family name- Mitch Yeager’s grandfather.”

“Who was dead long before 1945,” Hailey said, “so the company was Mitch’s in those years.”

“Which doesn’t prove he knew that one driver in one subsidiary was taking a truck out to that particular orange grove after hours,” Ethan said. “Or that he knew Harmon was killing and burying women all around a four-county area. If Yeager did know, it will be hard to show it.”

“This is always the problem with him,” I said. “He’s there, but just out of reach.”

“What do you mean?” Ethan asked. “I thought it was his nephews and minions who did all the killing.”

“Which is why he’s out of reach,” Hailey said impatiently.

I tried giving her a look that told her to back off. Hailey doesn’t really get the whole “back off” thing, which helps her as a reporter but makes working with her a pain.

“Tell me more about this,” he said, looking at me.

“You’ve read the original confessions Eric and Ian made, the ones they recanted?”

“Yes.”

“O’Connor said something to me about the statements they made-their theories about how to best punish someone. He called it the Yeager catechism.” I flipped to a page in my notes and read, “‘You want to make your enemy suffer, you kill the people he loves and hide the bodies-you make him wonder if they’re alive or dead. Nothing is worse than that.’”

“That was Eric,” Hailey said, pulling out her own notes. “Ian was almost word for word the same-‘If you kill the people he loves and hide the bodies, you kidnap them and never let them be found-you make him wonder if they’re alive or dead, if he’ll ever see them again, and he starts to think about what might be happening to them. Then your enemy suffers all his life. Nothing you could do to him is worse than that. Nothing.’”

“O’Connor once told me that when he heard those statements, he wondered if he could have become Mitch Yeager’s enemy before he was eighteen,” I said.

“He was seventeen when his sister disappeared,” Ethan said. “I spent some time reading about that today. But what could he have done to harm Mitch Yeager?”

“He was a reporter,” Hailey said. “He could have written something to harm Yeager’s businesses.”

“None of his early stories were about Yeager,” Ethan said. “He seldom had any stories published with a byline until late 1945.”

“You’re the expert on O’Connor, all right,” Hailey said.

Ethan looked mortified.

“Grow up or go upstairs,” I snapped at Hailey.

She cast a dark look at Ethan, as though he were to blame for my loss of temper.

“Ethan’s right,” I said. “O’Connor didn’t cause problems for Mitch Yeager as a reporter. He caused them for him when he was a child. A paperboy. He stood on a street corner after school each day and hawked newspapers. He managed to sneak into a courtroom gallery in 1936 and observe some jury tampering. He didn’t know it by that name, of course. He just saw one of Yeager’s louts obviously threatening someone who looked like the brother of a juror. He told his hero about it.”

“Jack Corrigan,” Ethan said.

“Yes,” I said, surprised.

“I-I saw one of the columns…”

I thought his courage was going to desert him, but he seemed to take hold of it again. He lifted his chin a bit and said, “I saw the tribute to Corrigan he wrote just after Corrigan died, so I know Corrigan was his mentor. You say O’Connor was Corrigan’s source for the jury-tampering story-did Yeager know that?”

“Yes. As a kid, O’Connor wrote little news stories that he gave to Jack. I’ve got those papers now. One tells of a ‘copper’ keeping an eye on him and protecting him from Yeager’s men. And of Yeager coming by one day and scowling at him. So somehow, Yeager must have heard of O’Connor. Maybe the man who was intimidating the juror figured out O’Connor was both in the gallery that day and connected with the Express. Or Thelma Ducane might have let word slip.”

“Okay…Mitch Yeager might blame O’Connor for the jury-tampering charge,” Hailey said. “Would he be involved in the death of O’Connor’s sister over that?”

“No, not just that. From the articles I’ve been looking into down here, and what I’ve read from O’Connor’s papers, here’s what I know-Mitch’s brother, Adam, was in prison while he was on trial. Granville, who had taken Mitch and Adam in when they were orphaned as kids, had died just a few months before-some said that Adam’s arrest had been too much for the old man to take. Adam and Mitch were, by all accounts, very close. So Mitch probably lays the arrest of his brother and the death of his grandfather at the door of Jack Corrigan-whose articles probably did have a lot to do with the investigations that led to the Yeagers’ arrests.”

“It’s not like Corrigan committed the crimes,” Hailey said.

“Yeager wouldn’t be the first to blame other people for what were really the consequences of his own actions. So while he’s on trial, Jack is in the courtroom every day, gloating, no doubt. You would have to know Jack Corrigan to know how well he could do that. The woman Mitch had been seeing, perhaps hoped to marry-to bring himself up in social standing if nothing else-was sitting at Jack Corrigan’s side and flirting with Jack during the trial.”

“Who?” Hailey asked.

“Lillian Vanderveer. Now Lillian Linworth.”

“Shut up!” she said in disbelief. “He wanted her?”

“She was a society beauty. You’ll be lucky to age as well as she has.”

“I’m beginning to see what you mean,” Ethan said. “It wasn’t just time and money lost to a legal hassle.”

“I think the worst of it for Mitch was that Adam became seriously ill with tuberculosis while he was in prison. Mitch wasn’t allowed to visit him, because the tampering charges caused his bail to be revoked.”

“So his brother is dying, his bail’s revoked, and though he owns a lot of assets, he doesn’t have much cash,” Ethan said.

“Right. And all the legal work for the family grows expensive. He’s had to sell assets already, and now he has to raise more money. He eventually goes free, but in the meantime his brother has died, his reputation is shot, and the best of his assets have gone to people who snub him. He’s left with the care of his brother’s widow and children, estate taxes, and an inheritance he’s been unable to properly manage while he’s dealt with his legal problems.”

“And it takes him a few years to get back on his feet,” Hailey said.

“Yes, and to reestablish himself in Las Piernas society. Did you find out the date of his marriage to Estelle?”

“He married her in June 1945. He eventually took over her father’s businesses, which increased his wealth enormously. His own businesses were doing much better then, so he didn’t come to her poor. He didn’t make the kind of money Linworth and Ducane made in the late 1930s-but he was better at manipulating. From what I could learn, he maneuvered them into positions where they had to come to him for supplies. Eventually, they were all doing a lot of business with one another.”

“When was the engagement announced?” I asked.

She looked through her notes. “March. There was a notice in the Society pages on March 23, 1945.”

“Two weeks before O’Connor’s sister was murdered,” I said. “I wonder if getting engaged to Estelle made him think about losing his chance with Lillian. And around that time the Express carried a story about how effective the new treatments for TB were.”

“Maybe it wasn’t as complicated as that,” Ethan said. “Maybe he was just biding his time, making sure that no one would see it as retaliation. If he had killed O’Connor’s sister right after the jury-tampering conviction was overturned, he would have been caught.”

“Do you really think Yeager is the one who killed her?” Hailey asked me.

“You mean, killed her himself rather than arranging it? I don’t know. Eric and Ian wouldn’t have been very old-not even out of grade school-so they didn’t help him. There’s this whole question of Harmon, though-or so I thought until the DNA came back.”

“No DNA samples on file for Mitch Yeager?” Ethan asked.

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“Why bother anyway?” Hailey said. “He’s so old, people won’t want him to go to jail. There are people who don’t want old Nazis to be punished. We don’t stand a chance. He’s going to throw a big old pity party for himself and people will buy into it. ‘I’m an old, old man who has served the community and the paper has always hated me.’ People will feel sorry for him. They won’t care about the dead.”

“It’s our job to make them care,” Ethan said. “To show them why they should. It shouldn’t be hard to do that, especially if he arranged the murder of a child. People want to see wrongdoing punished.”

“Well,” she said, staring right at him, “some people are found guilty of wrongdoing, and the world just seems to let them off with a slap on the wrist.”

That arrow found its mark, not surprisingly. He gathered his papers. He said to me, his voice not quite steady, “Forgive me-I’m not giving up, but I think we’ll have to talk more another time.”

He left.

Hailey shrugged, to all appearances unconcerned. I wasn’t exactly fooled by those appearances, but I was too furious at her to trust myself to speak.

“Do you want to know what I found out about the Ducanes?” she asked. “The business stuff is pretty boring, but I interviewed some people who knew the parents and they didn’t have much good to say.”

“Funny how some people are like that. I don’t think we should continue.”

“When do you want to meet again, then?”

“When is the big frost expected in hell?”

“Look, I know you’re mad at me because Ethan has you under his spell or whatever, but-”

“Oh no-Ethan wasn’t the witch in this meeting.”

“Don’t you think you should have asked me if I wanted to work with him, instead of just insisting on it?”

“No. Run upstairs and ask John or Lydia to explain to you why you are not in a democracy here. I obviously cannot get a single thing through to you.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry about what I said about Ethan, all right? All right? So can we please just get back to business?”

“You’re apologizing to the wrong person. Apologize to the right one, and maybe by tomorrow I’ll change my mind about not continuing to work with you on this.”

I left her sitting there and went back to the newsroom. Ethan was nowhere to be seen.

I had no sooner reached my desk than the phone rang.

“Kelly,” I answered.

Nothing.

I hung up. It rang again almost immediately.

I picked it up and didn’t say a word.

A woman’s voice said, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Yes, this is Irene Kelly.”

“Irene Kelly? I don’t know if you’ll remember me…you talked to me twenty years ago, but I didn’t tell you my name.”

“Betty Bradford,” I said. “I’m so glad you called.”

“I’m in Zeke Brennan’s office. He’s agreed you can be present when I talk to the police.”